


You Are My Favorite Place

by MaaaarianMadamLibraaaarian



Category: Anne of Green Gables (TV 1985) & Related Fandoms, Anne of Green Gables - L. M. Montgomery, Anne with an E (TV)
Genre: F/M, I have no beef with fics that decide that but it is not this one, I kept writing and writing and they wouldn’t KISS, I left twitter and got all this fic written wow who could have foreseen, Post Season 3, canon compliant to almost an absurd degree, first time posting on here pray for me, i love them, lots of pining, no idea what I’m doing with the chapter divisions, no they didn’t find a way to meet up mid-semester, post-separation reunion, the children get to hug, there’s a love letter, they just kept jabbering on and gazing and hugging and whatnot, was keeping it sweetly YA and may have overcorrected into extreme tame-ness?? no idea, which is a criminally underrated trope btw, you can see my dislike of making the home-college roundtrip filtering in here not-so-subtly, you weren’t home and I fell asleep waiting for you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2020-06-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:09:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24796714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaaaarianMadamLibraaaarian/pseuds/MaaaarianMadamLibraaaarian
Summary: Gilbert is coming home to Avonlea from Toronto for Christmas, and Anne hasn't seen him in person since he kissed her in front of her boarding house in September. They've been exchanging bi-weekly letters for months, but Anne is so in her feelings about it that she made an elaborate cherry pie. They are both going to do some wistfully staring off into the distance before they are reunited.
Relationships: Gilbert Blythe/Anne Shirley
Comments: 12
Kudos: 119





	1. Chapter 1

As the wind whipped her scarf around her, Anne thought about Gilbert on a cold train on such a bitter, relentless December day and hoped Bash had listened to Hazel and let them stop again at Constance and Jocelyn’s to warm up before heading back to Bright River. All four LaCroixs (including Elijah) had made the journey to Charlottetown to visit with Mary’s friends for the day before picking Gilbert up from the early-evening train. Anne had planned on going with them, but decided that she actually could not stand another smoky, clunky roundtrip to Charlottetown after boarding and un-boarding that train so often over the school term. She was happy just to be in Avonlea, happy to be in farm clothes instead of city clothes, happy to not worry about her classes, happy to be done with finals, happy to be seeing Gilbert soon. Meeting him as he came home with a fresh-baked pie was much more her style at the moment. 

Anne ended up jaunting over to the Blythe-LaCroixs with an unbaked pie in a basket at the exact moment Gilbert was due to be stepping off the train in Charlottetown. She'd warm up the oven and put the pie in, all while savoring, as she had been for the past eighteen hours, that every single moment was bringing her beloved closer to her. That feeling of missing him hurt the same amount as it always did, but shaped differently, like the dull, squeezing ache had sharpened into something with a sweet underside “closer, closer, closer, soon, soon, soon.”

She sat down to read in the rocking chair by the fire, carefully pulling the pie out when the kitchen was full of the scent of perfectly golden pastry. When the light started to fade she set her book down on her lap to dream a little bit. For the first time in months, missing him was a kind of scarce resource, something to revel in the feelings of for the moment, for it would soon be gone. Imagine that, the feeling of not-missing Gilbert. 

Ah, Gilbert. She thought about how far they had come. She’d known him during their time in Avonlea together, of course. They’d been dear friends, practically family. She knew the face he made when he read and the face he made when he was holding in a laugh and, even though she'd never recognized it for what it was at the time, she knew the face he made when he looked at her. She knew for sure that she knew exactly two of the faces he made when he was about to kiss her, and she'd rolled the memory of those faces over and over in her head until it was as smooth as a piece of sea glass. She’d loved that Gilbert, the tall boy with long strides on the path home, the tender boy in his kitchen with Delly, the sharp boy arguing back to her, the cheerful boy smiling quietly before breaking into a laugh at Bash and shaking his head, the smart boy making his case in class, the handsome boy in his starched collar, or his ratty suspenders, or his snow-covered sweater. The boy with the voice that scratched when he read aloud. The boy who looked at her questioningly, looking at her, looking right at her as if there was an answer he was looking for and hadn't found yet. 

But that Gilbert was a different Gilbert than the one she knew now. The one who wrote her twice a week, who told her every feeling of his heart about every topic under the sun. Who wrote about Bash and Delly with such tenderness and love; about his studies with such passion and frustration in turn; about Toronto with such meticulous detail that she could picture him wandering the city storing details to tell her so she could feel like she was there with him. The boy who asked her question after question after question, not with his eyes this time, but with his pen, patient as always as the letters came one after another, the only person in her life who had ever asked for more details, for more stories, for more of her day and more of her past, for everything she wanted to give, for more of her. The boy who had once carefully torn the bottom two inches of her own excited, cramped, overlapped penmanship off and sent it back to her with a note “I puzzled over it for two days and I don't want to miss a word you have to say to me. Please help.” She’d laughed as she recopied it in primary manuscript on even lines and sent it back in the envelope all by itself, addressed ‘in care of’ his housemate.

This boy opened every letter with some variation of “I read your letter three times.” Anne wasn’t sure if he knew he started every letter with basically the same sentence, but she didn’t want him to stop. The boy who closed every letter “With Love, Gilbert,” she always stared at it and traced so long that the curve of the W, L, G was behind her eyelids when she fell asleep. 

The boy she was in love with now seemed like a different boy altogether than the one she had known, but not different so much as MORE. Deeper. Longer. Bigger somehow. She wondered if he would look different. She didn't know how to be with this new Gilbert. It had been hard to be around him when she thought she loved him and he didn’t love her back, difficult to be in the same room with him, to avoid his magnetic presence. But this, this anticipation, felt odd, looming, worse in the dark. She wanted so much and she didn’t know how to line up that wanting with her imagined reality. She’d grown up and learned to manage her expectations and her daydreams. The problem with Gilbert was that there was so much daydreaming and that, truly, the last time she’d seen him had been so unbelievable that she was sure she’d exaggerated its perfection in the months since, in the replay of her brain. The imagining and the remembering seemed to meld into one, as she reached up and touched her cheek where he had held her that day, she wondered if it would feel the same way again, or if it was the rush of the moment, a one-time-only deal for first-timers. 

She’d told him so many things in the months of letters, but never told him how much she wanted to be in his arms again. It seemed like finally there was something she couldn’t put words to, couldn’t find words for. When she was in Charlottetown she missed Marilla and Matthew terribly, with all her heart. She missed the sounds of their voices and their calm energies and their rhythms as they moved around the house. She felt the ache inside. But missing Gilbert seemed to happen inside in her heart as well as skating up and down the surface of her skin. The letters assuaged one type of ache, but not the other. She wanted him and she missed him, and the two feelings felt the same but different, two sides of a sharp-edged coin. These things, however, she kept to herself, mostly because they only became this loud in her mind in the time right before falling asleep, the dark quietness of the house making her feel more alone than she did when outside or with people. 

So there was a simple stop to this dwelling on her aching insides, and that was another log on the fire, and another chapter of the book. Tired of dwelling on her longings, she effectively threw her brain into the book and was swept away almost immediately.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow not that you can tell with this chapter but I love to write dialogue, dialogue is the thing I love to write.  
> also I was full-on going to post this from my work computer because I have *zero* shame and *zero* to do at work but the filters locked me out so lol  
> *  
> oh right, credit to 5SOS's "Disconnected" for the lyric title. fic titling conventions are strange and i don't understand them but i lovvvvve this line so here we go


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He's home!

“She was going to bake the pie, but hopefully she went home before it got too late, I’d hate to think about her walking far in the dark," Hazel says, singsong while rocking the baby. 

Gilbert, heavy with the exhaustion of travel, his voice low, smiles a little, "Anne doesn't mind walking in the dark." He thinks of the story she told about the Haunted Forest and laughs lightly, then pictures Anne walking through the starlight, humming about how lanterns keep the friendliness of the dark away at night, "In fact, she loves it," under his breath he adds "It suits her."

He thinks of Anne dancing backlit by the bonfire light, of Anne talking a mile a minute while speeding down the path on a dim winter morning, of Anne in the full sunshine of a summer afternoon, tucking blossoms into her apron pocket. Every light suited her. 

Gilbert's brought back to the moment by Bash chuckling, "Aye, Blythe, you should probably not compliment your lady by saying the dark suits her. Not their favorite thing to hear when they've spent twenty minutes arranging their hair." 

"I know how to compliment "my lady," Sebastian," Gilbert scoffs.

"I've seen no evidence of that," Bash counters, "You called Delly a 'blesséd fat little pumpkin' when you saw her today, that's no way to talk to a woman."

Delly stirs at the mention of her name and Hazel shushes her, then drops her voice again, "Ah, boys, I know women, and I've made pies, and I've seen Anne's pie, and an Anne who is willing to cut that many tiny pastry hearts is an Anne who is well-satisfied with whatever Gilbert is sending her in those letters, you hear?"

"Thank you very much, Mrs. LaCroix, I'm prone to agree" Gilbert says with a pointed tone at Bash. 

The triumph of Hazel taking his side is quickly overwhelmed by the wistful thought of Anne making something beautiful for him, for him! and he looks away into the trees and lets out a soft sigh, promptly echoed by a mostly-asleep Delly, then a rustling from Elijah readjusting his head in the back of the wagon, at which noises Bash lets out a small laugh and clicks at the horse to go a little faster. 

........................

The house is dark and cool when they arrive, the fire in the hearth burned low but not out. Elijah takes Delly from Hazel to put her to bed while Hazel stokes the kitchen fire, noting with a smile the carefully cloth-covered pie on the table. Bash gestures that he will take care of the horses and Gilbert concedes gratefully, taking off his coat while doing the mental math as to if he can reasonably go to sleep right then without rummaging through his bag for anything. The quiet comfort of his home settles down on him heavily, and he feels more tired than he has during his whole multi-day journey. They all move so silently through the quiet house that both Hazel and Elijah hear Gilbert gasp and then the gentle _thud_ of him falling to both knees in the front room. 

Upon seeing Anne asleep in the rocking chair, Gilbert's heart left his chest in a gasp. He froze for just a moment, watching her breathe, taking in this image of her, of really her, not a memory.  
She was wrapped in a blanket with a book about to slide off her lap, the dim light of the fading fire glinting off her single long braid. Asleep, but with a knot of tension in her brow, the noting of which broke Gilbert out of his staring. He remembers, again, for the hundredth time but the first time in her real presence, that she was his, that he wasn't confined to simply looking at her anymore, that if he held her, she would hold him in return. Kneeling in front of her, he gently rubs her shoulder, taking care not to startle her, but unable to stop himself from pressing his lips to her forehead where she held her worry. She opened her eyes as he sat back on his heels, gently raising her hand to his cheek as she took him in, the image of him right before her, clutching her hand in his own, looking at her just as he always, always had. 

"Gilbert," she breathed, squeezing his hand, then, almost violently, "You're all right!" she cried, throwing her arms around him, letting out a brief sob as he pulled them both to their feet.

"Anne, my love, Anne," he reassured, one hand rubbing her back, the other against the back of her head. 

"You're all right!" she muffled against his shoulder.

"Nothing is wrong, shhhh, Anne."

"You were so late, and I..." she hiccupped slightly, a single-syllable laugh that might have been louder if Gilbert hadn't been holding her so tight, "I have a very active imagination."

She squeezed him, arms around his waist, feeling his cheek pressed against her head, as his chest expanded with a deep breath she felt him slowly release. 

"You're here," she whispered. "You're really here. It's not a memory or an imagining."

He wondered how she could read his thoughts, if she knew he was memorizing how she felt wrapped around his ribs, how she smelled like pastry and lilies, how her voice sounded this close, muffled against his clothes. 

" _You're_ here," he responded, "In my front room in the middle of the night."

"I was so worried."

"The train was delayed for a little bit on the way into Halifax, everything is fine."

She pulled back, seeing the heaviness in his eyes, the slight tremor in his hand resting on her shoulder, fingertips lacing over her braid. She touched his cheek again.

"You must be so tired, sweet."

He offered her half a smile as he leaned into her hand, as if he could hand her the weight of his head. "I am," he opened his eyes again, with effort, "I'll walk you home then I'm going straight to bed."

"You are not walking me home. Gilbert, you are dead on your feet."

"Anne --" he protested

"Absolutely not. I've spent a few hours already tonight worried about your whereabouts, and I'll not repeat that again wondering if you collapsed on the walk home from Green Gables."

His lips tightened into a line. 

She kept pushing, “If you try to walk me home, I will run, and you’ll have to chase me, and I’m much faster than you.”

He sighed and dropped his head onto her shoulder again, nuzzling into her neck. "Stubborn woman," he muttered. 

She laughed, rubbing a hand over the back of his head. 

"I'm not going to tell you what to do. I know that won't end well for me." 

"It really won't."

"You'll be safe?"

"Of course. I love the dark."

"I told that to Hazel on the way here. She thinks you're crazy."

"Maybe I am."

Gilbert sighs into her. 

Anne pulls back one more time, and his hands settle on her waist. She bounces on the balls of her feet a couple of times, trying to focus on his eyes in the dim room even though she can barely see him. "Gilbert?"

"Yes?" he says quizzically, one eyebrow quirking. 

She breaks into a grin. "I love you."

He has no choice but to wrap her up again, squeezing her so she almost lifts off the floor. Or possibly, grounding her so she doesn't fly off the floor. Either one feels like a possibility to her in this moment. "I love you so much, Anne."

"I've never said that to you in person before," she's awed.

"I know," he laughs. 

"I loved saying it."

"I love saying it, too. My Anne." He pulls back and kisses her forehead. 

It's just like writing to him, it really is. How she says what she is thinking and she doesn't have to worry about it because she's so sure of him. She loves him. 

She squeezes his hands in each of her own. "Will you go to sleep now, Gilbert?"

"Anything for you, my love. Be safe. Tell the Snow Queen 'hello' for me."

"I love you."

"I love you."

A very dazed, lovesick boy falls asleep in almost all of his clothes at the Blythe-LaCroix household that night, and very very very early that morning, only an hour or so past midnight, a very happy girl falls asleep too, after a walk home where it felt like she didn't touch the ground once.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> k pretend in the last chapter that she, later, got really worried about them taking so long. I tried to write it but it was always WAY too frantic and it didn’t make sense that she could worry that hard and then fall asleep.   
> also spellcheck is like ‘put a semicolon here’ and I’m like ‘f&ck you I’ll rewrite the whole sentence to avoid that’


	3. Chapter 3

When Anne hears Marilla knock on her door to wake her up the next morning, she only spends a moment lying in bed gazing at the ceiling.

"Gilbert's back," she says to herself, then directly to her window "Dear Snow Queen! Gilbert's back and I get to see him today." She leans out of bed to check that the bed itself is not floating on air, because that's how she feels. Wrapping herself in her thick housecoat and shoving her feet into her slippers, she barely takes a moment to smooth her hair while bouncing downstairs as quickly as she can.

"Marilla, I'm just going to grab some toast to eat on my way to go see -- Gilbert!"

"Anne, surely there's no need to shout," Marilla says through her barely contained smile. 

But there is a need to shout, because he's here! At Green Gables! Sitting at the table smiling up at her, looking right into her eyes and not seeming to be distracted at all by her everywhere hair or her hand-me-down housecoat.

"Hi, Anne, sorry to surprise you," she must be surprised, for she hadn't moved, "But I just couldn't wait."

He was looking much too well-rested and awake for someone who went to bed way past midnight last night and must have awoken at the crack of dawn to be here, here! Dressed and ready to go and he looked just like the boy she knew, just exactly like him, and ... 

Wait, she still hadn't moved. 

Gilbert was still grinning up at her, but he raised one eyebrow, perplexed as ever, and had started to stand when she recovered. "Oh Gilbert!" she wrapped her arms around his shoulders from behind and pressed a kiss into his cheek as he grinned.

"Marilla! Gilbert is here!" Anne bounces across the kitchen to where Marilla has been watching this whole exchange with a chewed smile.

"I know. I let him in!"

"He's here! At Green Gables! Drinking tea!"

"I know! I made him the tea! Please try to contain yourself, Anne," Marilla says, more out of habit than because she actually means it, or because she thinks Anne is going to heed that advice.

Which prompts both in-love teenagers to speak over each other:   
"Oh please, Marilla, don't tell her to contain herself"  
"I can't contain myself, Marilla, he's HERE"

Anne lets out a happy sigh, then kisses Gilbert glancingly on the cheek again, his hand rising to press hers on his shoulder, "Your presence here necessitates that I get changed. I'll be right back." 

Anne moves to go upstairs, giving him one more long, still look, until he turns to her, eyes twinkling at her across the kitchen, and she runs upstairs in a frenzy. 

Marilla chuckles, "You’re a young lady, not a troupe of elephants!"

"Sorry, Marilla!"

Gilbert smiles, warmed by the familiarity of their routine: Marilla trying to rein Anne in out of habit even though her heart is not in it, Anne responding with penance even though she'll forget again the next time she gets excited. There are so many things that Gilbert loves about loving Anne, but the feeling of belonging in her family is one of his favorites. The years and hours at Green Gables, the warm, familiar comfort of the reliable Cuthberts and energetic, lively Anne, were part of the reason he was so surprised when he realized all those months ago that the feelings he had for Anne were decidedly romantic, not just the deep-seeded affection for a family friend. Looking around now, at the trees Anne talks to outside, of this kitchen in which he's had so many meals, of Matthew's extra-big shoes by the door, of Marilla's special brown bread, he finds all of it so much sweeter because, in a way, it's his too. 

For someone who's spent so much time traveling and seeing the world, living away from home and hearth, on ships, on trains, in boarding houses, Gilbert has a rather ungrounded way of thinking about home. He knows it's not a place, it's not a building, it's not just the where your head hits the pillow at night. He knows that home is moments, that home is connection. When he read Anne's letters, the home-ness of them would wrap around him in the stale air of his Toronto student room. When Bash gives him grief and tries to break him into laughing, the home-ness of it would wrap around him in the thick air of the steamer. When Anne had smiled at him in front of that Charlottetown boarding house he'd barely found in time, the home-ness of that had wrapped him up and carried him all the way to the city. When his classmate recited Whitman, _“And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years,  
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait,”_ the home-ness of his father wrapped around him no matter where he was. The home-ness of Marilla rolling her eyes at Anne upstairs wraps around him too.

….

A handful of minutes later, Anne, in a day dress and a single, neatly plaited braid, practically tumbles down the stairs mere minutes later, overzealously taking what can only be termed a crash into the wall at the turn of the stairs in her haste.

"A herd of hippopotomi, Anne?" 

"Sorry, Marilla, I just --" she slides into the room, turns her head left, then right, then turns around quickly, before almost shouting, "Did he LEAVE?" 

Gilbert's not in the room anymore. Nowhere to be seen.

She looks again at the mostly-empty mug of tea on the table where he'd been sitting. He had been here. She hadn't dreamed it. She hadn't pinched herself, but she still knew it hadn't been a dream.

"Matthew came in looking for you or Jerry, Anne, and Gilbert offered a hand. They're in the barn, no need to worry."

Anne releases a breath, then moves to Marilla to place the butter and sugar on the table "That's ridiculous, Gilbert can't do work, he hasn't had breakfast yet."

"He has, in fact, he mentioned it. And this is good, Anne, it will give you a moment to eat something yourself before you get distracted again."

Anne is having moderate success at keeping the crumbs in her mouth while chewing her toast as fast as humanly possible.

Marilla senses that the more she talks, the less space Anne will have to cut in with words of her own, the more food Anne will intake, so she continues, "He mentioned his breakfast because he said he ate some of your pie. He said that Hazel had insisted."

Anne grins, and only one crumb goes rogue in the enterprise. "I think I perplex Hazel, but she does respect my devotion to a good pie."

Anne throws back her still-almost-hot tea in a truly shocking gulp, already scarfed, hatted, and out the door before the tea has made its way all the way to her stomach. 

Marilla watches Anne make her way across the yard, her relative calm, even stride denoting a real increase in maturity while away at college. What an upright young woman Anne is growing into, Marilla thinks, just as Anne takes a skipping swirling turning jump with her arms thrown out, and Marilla chuckles, a little at her own mislaid hopefulness and a little at the charming girl outside.

Anne is moments from a long, poetic session of introspection as she makes her way towards the barn, about to have thoughts about the beauty of winter, about the anticipation of Christmas, about the gift of kindred spirits, when Gilbert exits the barn and the sight of him immediately puts a stop to it. Every train of thought on every track is re-routed to focus on him. For once in her life, nature can wait, the snow on the eaves can wait, the icicles can wait, the foggy breath of the cows can wait. All that matters is the sudden sensation of being swung around in a circle by this wonderful, laughing boy, who immediately takes her hand and runs with her across the yard. 

"Gilbert why are we running!"

He pulls her around the corner of the house, "Come here," then faces her, grabbing both her hands and beaming at her.

After a second, "Gilbert?"

"Yes?"

"Did you sleep all right last night?"

"Yes."

Anne steps in closer, "And you had some of my pie?"

"Yes, I did"

"Did you like it?"

"Yes." None of her hair is out of place, so he reaches up and pulls her hat more securely down over her ears. They're standing so close they are almost touching. 

She squeezes the hand still in hers, but doesn't look away from his eyes, "Gilbert?"

"Yes?"

"Are you going to kiss me now?"

He's nodding, whispers, "May I?"

She nods, a little dazed, and he drops his head, placing soft kisses in a line on her cheek, over her grinning dimple before stopping to linger at the corner of her mouth. Her skin starts buzzing. Lightly he traces his fingertips on both hands over her cheekbones to cradle her face in his palms, closing his eyes to drop another kiss at the corner of her mouth.

It's very sweet, and Anne wants to remember every detail of it, but she huffs out an impatient breath, tugging on his chin to bring their mouths together. His laughing response is cut short when she parts her lips and pulls him in closer, tugging on his coat. 

The urgency of his mouth is belied by the tenderness of his hands, when one shifts to the back of her head, grazing the skin at the nape of her neck, a shiver runs down the whole length of her spine and liquefies her knees. The short moments of space between their mouths give her time to breathe but not near enough time to say anything, not that she could. 'He tastes like tea' is Anne's last conscious thought before the gentle scrape of his teeth against her bottom lip obliterates all thought entirely.

Anne gasps softly and Gilbert's response is to bend his knees, lace his arms around her waist and lift her off her feet completely.

When she reaches the earth again, he kisses her forehead, eyelids, and nose before burying his face in her scarf over her shoulder, breathing deeply. She leans the side of her head into his and slides her fingers through his hair, humming lightly. 

"Mmmm, Anne, I love you," he whispers.

"I love you, too, and not just because you are absurdly good at that," she teases, reveling in his comfortable warmth pressed against her.

He nuzzles his nose against her shoulder and laces his fingers through hers, "It's a joint effort."

Anne would be perfectly satisfied to stay like this for hours, or even to go back to kissing, but she feels more than sees Gilbert let out a long sigh before he lifts his head.

"We should go inside. Your hands are cold through."

Anne's eyes widen in alarm, "Oh, My nose has likely reached its most supremely unflattering hue." He grins and his eyes sparkle. "No, Gilbert don't look!"

He throws his head back and laughs, pulling both of her hands from her nose before kissing the cherry-cordial-colored offender itself. "I like your nose."

"At this color?"

"At all the colors, though blue would be alarming."

"More alarming than purple? Or less?"

They chatter all the way back to the warm kitchen, and when they return, blame their red flushes on the cold December morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me @ me writing this: when are they gonna kiss already  
> the characters, through the fifth wall, directly at not the audience, but me, the author herself: “can we please kiss now. stop stalling”  
> me: if you two don’t behave I’m going to just say “they kissed” and fade to black. stop mocking me through the fifth wall.  
> *  
> next chapter we get a letter, which I am far far more experienced at than kissing.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "What are you doing, Gilbert?"
> 
> "I'm writing you a letter."
> 
> _How did he know that she’d spent weeks wishing she could picture the face he wore as he wrote to her?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I underline so much when I hand write letters, and I guess that I passed that habit on to Gilbert, whoops

My Dearest Anne,

I wanted to write you one proper love letter, which I suppose I haven't done since I re-wrote the letter I left you before leaving Avonlea. I love your letters, and I hope you get even a fraction of the joy from mine that I get from yours. When I read your letters, I feel like I'm there with you, like I'm experiencing Queens and Charlottetown and the antics of the girls, like I'm hearing Marilla punch dough talking about what frustrating thing Mrs. Lynde said to her, like I'm with you as you sit in gardens and walk down lanes and prance through the woods. You tell me what you think, what you do, what you feel, what has happened, and I cherish that. 

I always sit down to read a new one, and I will think that I know you so well, confident in my ability to speak fluent Anne, and then you surprise me again with something I didn't know about you: that you don't care for pumpkin pie, that you have some mornings where you wake up angry, that your favorite month is October even if your favorite season is spring. I think my opinion of you is as high as it can go, and then you twist a sentence into such elegance that I'm amazed all over again, that the English language can even be so beautiful, let alone as consistently as you make it beautiful. Maybe I'm biased, but I think everything around you and everything you touch becomes beautiful in your presence.

I like our letters just the way they are (even if my greedy heart sometimes longs for a letter every day, I know you'd have no time to have adventures to write me about if you spent that much time writing to me). Marilla and Matthew were right all those months ago when you spoke with them. We are young, and our educations and ambitions are important to us. It's good to keep things friendly. Miss Stacey was right too, that we don't have to be engaged or formally courting to know that we belong to each other, to know that our love is real. The rules of society, the commentary of strangers, none of that matters. Also, it may be devilish of me, but I can't help but get a twist of joy in doing anything that would shock or dismay our beloved and respected Mrs. Rachel Lynde. Especially when I know it isn't harming anyone. We have so much time to be in love, the world is wide, there's no need to rush things.

That being said, I did start by saying I wanted to write you a proper love letter (though whether invoking the image of Mrs. Rachel Lynde has doomed my intention already is yet to be seen).

Anne, I'm looking at you right now, and I love you so much my heart is swelling in my chest. I wanted to do this here, now, so when you read it you know that my memory isn't being flawed by any memory lapse, any lost details, any small alterations. I write this love letter to the Anne that is right in front of me. I'm not sitting in my room in Toronto, far away from you, you can't claim I'm imagining a girl more beautiful than you when I tell you how beautiful you are. There is no one more beautiful than you, Anne. I don't imagine your hair a single shade different, don't imagine one single less freckle on your face, don't imagine anything about you a single iota different than who you are right now. Parted from you, I was amazed at how crystal clear my memory of you was. Your elegant hands, your shining eyes, the cadence of your voice, the way you move through a room. A photograph couldn't be clearer or more accurate than my full-color, full-vibrancy, full-sound memory of you. When I daydream, I imagine you in different places, with me. Showing you Toronto, exploring Paris, navigating London, sitting by the fire with you, reading out loud with you, listening to you sing in the kitchen. I imagine my arm around you and the smell of your hair and the sparkle in your eyes. I imagine us growing older and wiser, chasing around children, making friends, and building a home.

Anne, I feel when I look at you the same way I feel when I look out over the ocean. I feel like there is a whole wide world of possibilities, that my future is out there and right in front of me. Like the whole vast, unknowable world is right there for me to spend the rest of my life learning about. When you smile at me, I know.

I'm more sure of you, Anne, than I've ever been of anything. I've spent a lot of the last few years not sure about what I want. I've had a few moments of clarity: deciding to pursue medicine, deciding to split the deed to the farm with Bash, working hard on my Queens entrance exam revising. But nothing has come close to how sure I feel about you. These past few months, in medical school, writing you, have been the most confident I've ever been that I was doing the right thing. I've never doubted that, as hard as school is, as hard as it is being away from you, and away from home, that I've been on the right path. Not just the right path, but the path that will make me the most happy. The path that will bring me where I want to be, where I want you and I to be: together, in a long and happy life full of mayflowers and sunset walks and fresh-bread mornings.

I want you to be as sure of me as I am of you. I want you to know that I want you. That there is no other girl, no other person, ever, who I will ever love the way I love you. The world may be wide, but I don't have to see all of it to know that. I don't want to tie you down at all because I am so eager to see what you can do with the whole world at your fingertips.

When we're older, when we're closer to the end of school, I'll propose. But until then, I want you to have this letter to know that I am totally and completely yours. My eyes, my arms, my lips, my heart, my soul, only belong to you. When I imagine my future, you are next to me. When I imagine perfect happiness, you are in front of me, smiling.

I love you, I love you, I love you. I want to say it more, say it in a thousand different ways, but you just finished your muffins and sat beside me, and so I must close this letter so I can kiss you. I have the slightest inkling you will understand.

With Love,

Gilbert

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was going to write the situation around the letter, the room, Anne making muffins, Gilbert at the table, etc but suddenly didn’t see the point, so here we have the letter all by itself.
> 
> *
> 
> Trying to write as Gilbert is overwhelming because I have to focus in on all the things that I love about him-- his earnestness, his ambition, his intentionality, his intensity, his reservation, his mature emotions, his urgent need to do the right thing—and then I end up crying bc I love him so. what a gem, that boy.
> 
> Thanks for reading 💖💖


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